


Entitled

by via_ostiense



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-09-26
Updated: 2004-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-17 02:43:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/172061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/via_ostiense/pseuds/via_ostiense
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hajime is a boy with a huge chip on his shoulder. Third person musing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Entitled

Mizuki has always felt that life owes him. He should have been captain, he should have been singles one, he should have beaten Fuji Syusuke at prefecturals. He does all the work; he decides the lineup for each match; he is bench coach; he directs the rest of the team and pits their strengths against their opponents' weaknesses. Akazawa was made captain instead, though, to everyone's surprise, and kantoku refuses to let Mizuki play singles one, claiming that his style of data tennis is abhorrent and dishonorable. Slyness should not be rewarded, no matter how successful it is, he says. Mizuki grinds his teeth whenever he thinks about that - kantoku is remarkably willing to leave the training of the team to him and to turn a blind eye to his "cowardly exploitation" of other teams' weaknesses once it's time for the matches to start.

As for Fuji - Mizuki should have won that match. He trained long and hard, pushed himself against in continuous matches against Akazawa, Kisarazu, and Kaneda so that he could defeat Yuuta's aniki. He should have been the victor, but his ambitions and half-formed ideas of being the one to show Yuuta that his aniki was merely human ended in a disgraceful sprawl on the tennis courts.

Mizuki hates seeing Yuuta on the phone at night. He knows who's calling even before a scowl erupts over his protege's face and the room starts echoing with affronted yelling, because only Fuji Syusuke calls Yuuta on school nights. He feels that Yuuta is his and that no one else should have such a hold over him, especially not the aniki. He was the one to hear rumours about a brilliant first year floating aimlessly around the street courts, he was the one to recruit Yuuta for St. Rudolph's, he was the one to hear the younger boy's gripes and resolve to silence them. Yuuta allows himself to be defined by the other Fuji, and this is not right, not when he's such a vivid, alive person in himself. So Mizuki decided to defeat Fuji and make Yuuta realise that there is more to tennis than a vendetta; when it ends, what's left? He doesn't want Yuuta to drop the team and leave him once he's settled a short lifetime's worth of being compared to his older brother.

He wants Yuuta to know that for some people, Syusuke is not the one who matters. Yuuta ran away from Seigaku to escape his aniki's shadow, but for Mizuki, it has never existed. Syusuke is a prodigy in the junior high tennis world, but he isn't any more important to Mizuki than Tezuka or Atobe or any of the other brilliant tennis players out there. Yuuta is real, a protege of his own, not merely an opponent. Sometimes, Mizuki wonders if Yuuta could be more. He could be more than a close friend, and he could stop ignoring Mizuki in favour of obsessing over his aniki. After the effort that Mizuki has gone through for Yuuta, he thinks that he is owed this much, at least.


End file.
